I Hold With Those Who Favor Fire
by bbbbbb100
Summary: Some oneshots of Clary and Jonathan/Sebastian as children if they'd grown up together.
1. Chapter 1

**Not sure how far I'm going to go with this, so let me know if you guys like it or not ^_^**

* * *

The girl, no older than three or four, runs through the field, her hair flying behind her like a trail of flame. She is barely able to run in a straight line for her bright, unadulterated laughter that fills the meadow, as pure as a toddler's carefree joy should be.

Close on her tail is her brother, his arms outstretched to grab her. His white-blond hair is falling in his eyes, and he is slowed down by his futile attempts to push it back. Not that it matters. He is already going much slower than his maximum speed for the sake of his sister. She loves to play chase with him, and he is happy to comply, if only for the joy that fills him when he sees that he is entertaining her, that he is making her happy.

Though he is only five, he seems to give out a dark aura, making him seem much older than his actual age. But Clary does not notice this, a fact that he is so, so grateful for. Valentine, his father, has told him more times than he can count that Jonathan is a monster, a monster that could never hope to be loved, let alone have the capability of reciprocating that affection. But Jonathan refuses to believe this, as long as he has Clary. Clary is his tether, to keep him from falling into the blackness that his father insists is an inevitable part of him.

But he does not dwell on any of this right now. All that exists for him right now is his little sister, almost swallowed up by the neglected grass that chokes the valley they live in. But he can still see her, if only for her colorful hair, fluttering through the green like a scarlet butterfly, something so beautiful that to disturb it would be almost a crime.

He wraps his arms around her waist, and she squeals in delight and surprise.

"Got you now, little tiger." he whispers, and picks her up, something no five year old should be able to do. But Clary is too young to realize this, and she wriggles in his arms, pounding her chubby toddler fists against him. She is strong, but nowhere near as strong as him.

He drops her, not afraid that she will begin to cry at the impact. A child of Valentine rarely cries. Instead, she giggles and, leaping up, tackles him.

At the last moment, he catches her and holds her at arm's length away from him.

"Easy there, feisty." He laughs, his onyx eyes sparkling. Clary, though she does not know it, is the only person who has seen this side of him, the only one who will ever bring this out of Jonathan.

But then, Jonathan succumbs to her wildly swinging fists, and they tumble through the field like two puppies, utterly carefree for the time being. But, as even young Clary knows, this brief moment of joy won't last long.


	2. Chapter 2

_*Jonathan*_

Jonathan never begs for anything. He still burns with the scars of that lesson. But he is begging now, begging for a child's toy, of all things.

It is a snow-white bear, a plush, well-made thing, with eyes that seem to shine as if it were living and a sewn golden nose. But best of all, wrapped around its neck is a silk ribbon the color of emerald, the color of the richest leaves on the trees in the summer…the exact shade of Clary's eyes. Whenever he sees it, it is like he is seeing her, right next to him. She would love it, and that is why he must have it.

"You want a...stuffed bear?" Valentine asks, his eyes narrowed to obsidian slits. They are in France, but they have not come to see the things that attract so many hordes of tourists. Valentine needs to consult with the High Warlock of Paris, and he brought Jonathan along to give him the experience he will need for the future. A decision he must be sorely regretting now.

Jonathan shrugs, pretending to be nonchalant. "It would make us seem less suspicious, if we went in and bought a stuffed toy. You might not realize it, but right now, we look like terrorists. The police must have taken notice by now." He makes a point of ruffling his heavy black cloak, the matching pair to Valentine's. They are strategically draped over each of them to avoid any of their features being seen. Jonathan does not need it as much as Valentine does. His father's face is widely known-and feared-throughout Downworld.

Valentine laughs. "What do you care of the mortal police? You are strong enough to take them all down, even at your tender age."

 _Strong enough to take_ you _down._ Jonathan thinks the words, but does not say them aloud. He knows that Valentine is thinking the same thing. Valentine knows that by feeding his wife demon blood when she was pregnant with their son, he has created something stronger than him. And he knows that one day, he will pay the horrible price.

"No," Valentine continues. "I don't think that is your motive, boy. But perhaps your sister is. Perhaps she could be the reason behind this foolish request." He laughs. "You are a sick, twisted thing. Do not try to trick yourself into believing otherwise. You do not care for her, nor does she for you. When will you learn these things?"

Without giving Jonathan a chance to respond, Valentine strides off, expecting his son to follow. Gritting his teeth, Jonathan does. But this is not over. He will get that bear for Clary, even if by the end of this, its silky white fur is stained red.

 _Les Merveilles de Demain_. The Wonders of Tomorrow. The painted red letters were barely visible in the night, even with Jonathan's enhanced eyes, even with the city lights of Paris flashing all around him. People bustle past him, and he steps out of the throng, confident that he has correctly retraced his steps. The city is still clearly alive, but the store is closed, providing a stubborn contrast to the enticing shops that sandwich either side of it. He could see the white bear behind the glass window display, its fur almost luminescent against the shadowed background of the store. It occurred to him that he could just break the glass and be gone from the place within a few seconds, but he felt that would be too brash. Valentine would know about it almost immediately if he caused a commotion such as that, and Jonathan shivers at the thought of Valentine ever discovering what he was about to do.

So, he needs to get in to the store silently and stealthily. But the door is locked, and attempting to pick it would bring too much attention to himself.

The door is made of weathered wood, with a lopsided CLOSED sign hanging off of the worn brass doorknob. There is a large window in the door, but green and pink striped curtains are drawn over it, blocking any view inside. Jonathan studies the curtains. He is almost certain that they are moving, rustling as if there were a breeze inside the shop.

Jonathan walks to the glass display containing the bear and peers in, trying to see the shop beyond the various children's toys. Yes, there it is—he can just make out a glowing strip of light on the opposite end of the shop, moonlight filtering in to glow on the carpeted floor: a window left ajar. Perfect.

He goes around to the back of the shop, slipping through the small area of space between the shop and its neighbor. He has always hated small spaces, and he has to focus on even breaths whilst traversing the narrow gap. _I will not be claustrophobic. I will_ not _be claustrophobic._

The shops are nowhere near as showy from the back. It is evident that the places that the people do not see are rarely, if ever, cleaned. Jonathan's nose wrinkles in mild disgust as a rat scurries by him, disappearing into a rain gutter. He cranes his head up to the sky, illuminating his face in the moonlight. Breathes the rancid air, in and out. Tries not to think about Valentine, what he would do if he could see Jonathan right now.

The ajar window creaks, and catches his attention immediately, snapping him back to the present. A gentle breeze has picked up, and now the window groans as it sways further open. Jonathan looks in, but he can see little more than from before. He shrugs nonchalantly, but an uneasy feeling plagues him, and he grips the hilt of Heosphoros. He's never much liked the thing; Phaesphoros is the sword he wants, the sword he vowed to himself to kill Valentine with. That seems a fitting death for the man, somehow: killed by his blood, bearing his blade. Jonathan grins briefly at the thought, then shakes his head of the idea. He will savor the thought later. Right now, he needs to focus.

Jonathan leaps into the store with the lithe grace of a cat, without so much as brushing the window. As soon as his boot-clad feet hit the floor, he moves swiftly towards the bear. Get it and go.

He reaches for it, and right as the tip of his finger is about to brush the satiny emerald ribbon, a human hand, clearly feminine, reaches out from the darkness and grabs him, wrapping around his wrist in an iron-like grip.

But if this being is iron, then he is steel; he rips his hand free easily, and within a second wields Heosphoros, bracing it against the darkness. It would be foolish to swipe blindly; that would give the thing the advantage. His only option is to speak.

"Show yourself." He says. "I, Jonathan Morgenstern, son of Lilith, command you to show yourself."

A woman emerges from the shadows, palms out to face him. She looks to be in her fifties or sixties: thick, wire-rimmed spectacles propped on a beak-like nose, wrinkles stretching as the corners of her lipsticked mouth tilt up in a toothy smile. Her eyes shine a bright blue from below painted black eyelashes. That's odd. Usually, Eidolons' human forms have black, void-like eyes.

"I'm sorry, young man, I didn't mean to startle you. I am the shopkeeper. Now, would you be ever so kind as to put that sword aw—"

Her mindless chatter is interrupted by an expulsion of air as Heosphoros penetrates her chest, and blood rises up to clog her throat and bubble at her lips. Jonathan waits patiently for its human form to fade into a writhing demon and then fold up back to its realm, but nothing happens. There is so much blood, and it doesn't stop.

She must have been a human, then. Jonathan calmly extracts Heosphoros from the woman's still-twitching body, cleans it off on her shirt, and sheathes it. Then, he grabs the bear from the shelf, shoving it in his pack. There is a thin streak of blood on the bear's back, and Jonathan curses himself for being so careless. Now, he will have to come up with a lie to tell Clary, and he dislikes having to lie to her.

When Jonathan is ready to leave, he turns back to the woman's body. He will have to get rid of it somehow, lest it be all over the news tomorrow. Which is easy enough.

Jonathan sees it on the screen the next day, as Valentine is preparing for them to Portal back to the valley. "FREAK FLAME ACCIDENT LEVELS SHOP AND KILLS SHOPOWNER. WITNESSES SAY MAN IN BLACK LEATHER WAS SEEN EXITING CLOSED SHOP AT TIME OF DISASTER."

Jonathan curses silently. He was evidently not as careful as he'd thought he'd been. But fortunately, Valentine is on the phone and doesn't seem to be paying attention to the little TV. Jonathan smiles in relief, just a small twist of the lips. He has gotten away with it.

Clary loves the bear, calls him Scar because of the bloody stripe down his back. Jonathan lets her have it, on the one condition that she hide it from Valentine at all costs. She does not question this; she seems to know without asking that Jonathan acquired it very much against their father's wishes. Only when Valentine has gone on one of his excursions without the two of them does she ever take it out, play with it. But as careful as she is, Jonathan knows that Valentine will inevitably discover Scar. He knows that when he does, Valentine will break Clary's heart, and when her heart heals, she will hate Valentine just a little bit more, grow just a little more close to Jonathan instead. Eventually, she will choose Jonathan over Valentine, and when she does, Jonathan will act. He will get them both out of this hell.

Reflecting on this, he supposes that in this way, he did not get the bear only for Clary; he partly got it for himself.


	3. Chapter 3

Daddy always takes me to see the world when Jonathan is in a bad mood.

While we're on the trips in his "traveling apartment", as he calls it, Daddy tells me that normal brothers don't do the things Jonathan does when he's angry. He says that normal brothers' pupils don't dilate until they swallow up the iris, that they don't literally rip parts of the house down, rock by rock, and are then forced to rebuild it as punishment. He tells me that normal brothers don't need to go on killing sprees to level their mood, and that they can control whether they hurt their sisters or not.

I don't believe him.

The first time Daddy took me away was when he came home one day to me screaming, Jonathan standing over me with a seraph blade clutched in his grip. He had broken my arm, three of my ribs, and cut a bloody gash from the corner of my mouth to the edge of my eyebrow, nearly avoiding my eye. I was five; he had been six.

Valentine took me up to my room and soothed me until I'd stopped crying, healed me with countless iratzes, and told me to wait there until he came back upstairs.

So, like a good daughter, I did what he told me to, getting a book that Valentine had assigned me to read earlier that week and beginning to study it. I was well engrossed in the text when I heard the enraged shouting coming from downstairs.

It was Valentine's voice, and I ran to the door, thinking I needed to stop this, for I was the one that had made Valentine so angry at Jonathan. But of course the door was locked, probably with a rune, and I hissed in frustration. The voice faded but didn't lessen in intensity, which meant they were heading outside. I ran to my window, and tried to look out of it, but it was too dusty and tinted to get a good view of anything. That was when the screams started.

Not ordinary screams, either. Deep throated, animalistic screams that spoke of unimaginable terror. I began to scream too, because I knew that those horrific sounds were coming from my brother, the steady, unbreakable figure in my life who never showed pain, ever. What Valentine was doing to force those sounds out of Jonathan, I knew only that I didn't want to know. But I was getting down there, regardless of the awful things that my imagination was concocting. I was going to save him from my father.

I grabbed my stele from underneath my pillow and carved out a rune on the old, yellowed window: _open_.

I bore down as hard as I could while writing it, my little hand shaking with the effort. It glowed when it was finished, the only sign that it had worked before the entire wall of my bedroom flew off.

I was forced back by the explosion, and when I finally got to my feet, coughing, everything was smoking. What had I done?

Thankfully, they were too far away for me to see too much detail on Jonathan besides a few bright splashes of blood. Still violently coughing, I managed a single, frail sentence before blacking out: "Stop hurting him, Daddy."

I can still remember the last thing I heard before sinking into oblivion: Jonathan's laughter, clear as a bell and filled with a child's delight. Hazily drifting into subconsciousness, I managed to smile. He always did have a beautiful laugh.

* * *

When I woke up, I was on a huge, square bed. I jumped down from it and toddled into the hallway beyond the room. I needed to see Jonathan and Daddy. Where were they?

"Clarissa?" I hear Daddy call. I run to his voice, and find the kitchen. I look around it in wonder. It is so much bigger than the one at home. Everything in it is larger, sleeker, and colder, too, even though it is room temperature.

Sitting in one of the chairs at the kitchen table is Daddy, drinking something steamy from a red mug. "Hello, Clarissa." He says pleasantly.

"Where's my brother, Daddy?"

He takes a sip from the mug. "Jonathan is back at the cottage."

"Why?"

"Do you remember when he broke your arm?"

"Yes."

"That was because he was in a bad mood. We're going to stay here until he calms down, so you don't have a chance of getting hurt by him again."

I don't understand. "But why was he in a bad mood, Daddy?"

"Jonathan is very different from you, Clarissa. You are good, and he is bad. Sometimes, the bad look upon the good and realize just how wicked they are. And sometimes, that realization rips apart their soul."

My bottom lip quivers. "So it's because of me?"

Daddy is considering how much he should tell me. "In a way, yes. But you cannot help it, no more than he can. It is just the way the world works, my dear."

He refused to answer any more questions on the topic, and eventually, I stopped asking, finally willing to accept that I could do nothing about it.

When I was older, and able to comprehend the situation better than I had when I was five, I realized that after Daddy had left me in my room after healing me, he could have put a silencing rune on that door he locked, to spare me from hearing my brother be tortured. But he didn't. And, though I want to, I still don't believe that it was just that the thought simply didn't cross his mind.

He wanted me to hear my brother in pain.

Wanted to see how I would react to it.

Like I was an experiment, and Jonathan was the catalyst to set it off...not at all like we were his own children, his own blood.

Sometimes I wonder if Daddy has the heart of a demon, after all.

It would make so much sense.


	4. Chapter 4

I remember the first day I woke up to Jonathan's bloodcurdling screams. It was one in the morning, on the first day of my fourteenth year.

Almost on an instinct, I run into my brother's room, not sure of what I can do but positive that I can do something. Daddy's not here, on the second day of one of his "business" trips.

My brother is writhing in his sheets like a wild animal, wailing in pure panic when they become so tangled that his movement is restricted. He's still asleep, but clearly in suffering, most likely having some sort of nightmare.

I freeze in my place at the threshold, terrified. What on earth was I supposed to do? I'd never seen my brother like this. He'd never had a nightmare, not since before I could remember.

"Jonathan?" I call hesitantly, but of course he doesn't hear me. I force myself to take a step into his room, and then another, until I stand at the foot of his bed. He is sitting upright now, and his screams have given way to pleas for...something, begging to some force that I cannot see. His words are incoherent, but his desperation in saying them is obvious. I bite my lip, then make up my mind and go around the bed to place my hand on his shoulder. He recoils from my touch as if it burns him, and I can see that his eyes are open wide in panic. But I know, somehow, that he cannot see me, cannot see anything except for whatever hell he must be imagining.

"Jonathan." I say, with more force, and he freezes for a brief instant at my voice, then puts his hands to his temples and begins to whisper words in a different language, the sounds almost seeming to force their way out of his throat, choking him.

"Jonathan, it's me, Clary. Whatever you're seeing isn't real. It's not real, Jonathan. Please come back to me..." I continue to talk as I slowly crawl onto the bed. At least he's not thrashing anymore; now, he is rocking back and forth, his eyes listlessly roving, not focusing on anything.

I'm so scared, both for him and for me, as well. Jonathan is so much stronger than me. To make it worse, I can see that his mind is not in his head now, not in the present. If he lashes out, even just once...that could very well be the end of me.

But I need to stop his pain. I'll do anything to make him stop hurting. And that is how I ended up slowly—so as to not make any sudden movements, as if he were a wild animal—drape my arms around his shoulders and lock them together in front of his chest.

He freezes, goes more still than any human could possibly be, and this is the moment of truth. If he wanted to, he could kill me right now, in between two of his rampant heartbeats that I now feel thundering against my interlocked hands.

"Jonathan, please listen. It's your sister." I murmur into his ear, in the most soothing voice I can manage. "You can break free of this, I know you can. I believe in you. I am Clarissa Seraphina Morgenstern, your sister, and I know you can come out of this, Jonathan. It's not real. I swear it's not."

Jonathan shows no reaction for an indeterminable amount of time afterwards, and it feels like forever we remain in our position, with me embracing Jonathan from behind, our faces centimeters apart. I don't dare move; don't dare to break this somehow beautiful moment of peace between the two of us.

"Clary?" His normally clear voice is now hoarse and desperate and barely understandable, and it's the most perfect sound I've ever heard.

"Jonathan." I nuzzle my head into the crook of his neck, and he exhales.

"You weren't there. This time, I was running through some dark part of hell and I could hear your voice, calling my name, but I couldn't see you, and all I knew was that I had to keep going, keep searching for you—"

"Shh. You don't need to retell it if it pains you."

Jonathan twists around then to look me in the eyes, and I quickly retract my arms. His eyes are wide open...scared. Human. And if I strain my vision enough...I hope it's not a trick of the light that is making me see flecks of emerald in his otherwise black irises.

"But what if it happens, Clary? What if one day, you're not there with me, moved on to live in some Institute like you've always wanted, with some perfect Shadowhunter guy and I'll be alone?"

"Idiot." I breathe. "I would sooner die before I left you for anything in this world."

And though Clary sees Jonathan's mouth tilt up at one corner in a wry smile, like it is pulled by an invisible string, she fails to notice that Jonathan's eyes flick to her lips for an instant and then rise back up to meet her stare; nor does she see that when she leans in to embrace him again, he parts his lips and tilts his head towards her, leaning in for a very non-familial show of affection before he recovers.

And she never once opened her eyes whilst sleeping in her brother's bed for the rest of the night to notice him studying her, memorizing her like she was a delicious meal that he could look at but never hope to taste.

She doesn't know that with every passing day, her brother falls deeper and deeper in love with her.

He hopes to keep it that way.

* * *

 **A/N: I know that Clary's middle name isn't Seraphina; keep in mind that this is a hypothetical world in which she's raised under Valentine without Jocelyn :)**


End file.
